221–230 of 319 posts
I almost read the thing, but I can only read so many words in that horrendous font. Is this representative of the substance vs form stance of web3 ?
I have no idea what this does but turning this off made it readable.
> At the same time, smart contracts have some deeply problematic constraints: > Smart contracts can’t be upgraded. Smart contracts are deployed once and run forever; their code cannot be changed. The software development industry has literally zero experience with such a deployment model. I stopped reading here. First, this is factually wrong -- the software industry has tons of experience dealing with software that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When upward mobility has been stymied for generations (the US has the lowest upword mobility among Western nations, outdoing even the class-ridden Brits) and insane house prices, student loans and cost of living increases have cut all the bootstraps, people are looking for anything - anything - that offers the slimmest of opportunities, because education and hard work don't cut it any more. Hence the crypto nonsense…
So much wrong with that. Education and hard work drive labor. These aren’t qualities respected by any kind of wealth generators or management. If anything they are unrewarded implicit requirements except for labor where there aren’t other more substantial qualities to rate individual contributions. In most of the country house prices remained low and stable until very recently. Only a few coastal areas have seen deca…
> At the same time, smart contracts have some deeply problematic constraints: > Smart contracts can’t be upgraded. Smart contracts are deployed once and run forever; their code cannot be changed. The software development industry has literally zero experience with such a deployment model. I stopped reading here. First, this is factually wrong -- the software industry has tons of experience dealing with software that…
> ...instead focus on getting the code correct the first time This is a threshold that real-world contracts don't typically have to achieve. They leave lots of details out, or vaguely defined, because the odds are low that that part of the contract will have to come into play, and it's not worth the extraordinary effort and time and expense to negotiate every tiny very-unlikely-to-happen case. To quote Lawrence Lessi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So much wrong with that. Education and hard work drive labor. These aren’t qualities respected by any kind of wealth generators or management. If anything they are unrewarded implicit requirements except for labor where there aren’t other more substantial qualities to rate individual contributions. In most of the country house prices remained low and stable until very recently. Only a few coastal areas have seen deca…
I agree with you, but I am interested in hearing what qualities you feel are respected by wealth generators and management.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfer, verification via zero knowledge proofs, support for VR/AR and 3D objects. All of this stuff is either in prototype or draft phase, but it's ok. These things need to be built to stop horror stories on HN about "algorithm justice" and "data kingdoms”: - Google…
Lack of human support in the old Web 2.0 is bad, but going full zero-trust in response seems more like throwing a fit instead of improving things (e.g., banning the exploitative ‘free’ ad-supported business models). A world in which you lose some magic alphanumeric combination (or a thief pinches your hardware key, etc.) and you are literally locked out of your identity (together with access to your eternal blockchai…
- issue an ID
- create a policy
- ban if you break the ambiguous rules or trip some fraud algorithm
- not ban some people or orgs even if they break the rules, because they bring too much value to platform (= almost a bribe in some sense)
- and you can't really emigrate and take your belongings with you. Can you export your social graph from FB? Not sure if that's possible, at least not in a straightforward way, you need to recreate it on another platform again.
- Google and Apple become a little better with this last few years, there is data export (in a .zip, lol)
I agree with your second point. For non-technical users, taking care of their private key will be a huge issue. There are some models like multisig, or social recovery (you add a guardian or a set of trusted persons that can vouch for you).
AFAIK even FB has been trying out social recovery features.
This is a good post about social recovery wallets:
Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfer, verification via zero knowledge proofs, support for VR/AR and 3D objects. All of this stuff is either in prototype or draft phase, but it's ok. These things need to be built to stop horror stories on HN about "algorithm justice" and "data kingdoms”: - Google…
Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same…
- Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails and/or photos, docs, Drive files will be not recovered. Also non-technical person would probably skip this step.
The issue of not really being in control of your data can be solved by:
- regulating Google to let you access your data irrespectively if you are banned from their frontend or not. You can choose to export it in a standardized way to your own server, IPFS or another cloud provider. All data and metadata is exported and then parsed depending on capabilities of the receiving server.
- putting all of your data, encrypted, on IPFS or similar and creating multiple frontends for it (not unlike email clients, right? Similar idea). Then assigning your unique DID to this data, so it's part of your online belongings
- Next step would be regulating Google to allow you to use the complete user data stored on their servers with any client. Like an S3 bucket? Yes, something like that. Google can choose to charge some price for the access, that's OK.
GDPR tried to solve some of the high level issues related to user data, but it's not enough
Edit:
Google already has semi-closed APIs for some of their products, but only for partner businesses.
You're required to jump through multiple hoops to gain access (not guaranteed): https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overvie...
On Twitter: Jack does seem to have plans to make Twitter more decentralized, i.e. Bluesky https://blueskyweb.org/
Seem like they started off with brainstorming identity verification solutions and DIDs.
But I haven't followed them closely
Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for…
Go to a web3 site and use your wallet as your identity without any signin flow, don't click on any asinine cookie prompts, and you'll see it's already bringing improvements. Or you can just write comments like this.
So let’s say I want to try this out this weekend. Do I just download MetaMask and make a wallet? Do I have to go somewhere or pay someone to inscribe my username in the blockchain or does this basically work immediately? And what are some sites that support this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same…
This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain . But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then…